Look, the UN has made some glaring mistakes in the past, but overall, in 50 years it's averted several wars and organized the international community to usher in new public health practices and economic cooperation. It's peacekeeper efforts are successful most of the time, and its humanitarian assistance in places like Haiti saved plenty of lives. Net positives.

It's more a story of bad security practices than brilliant exploits by 12 year olds.

That _is_ the entire story. Nobody is saying that XYZ 1337 hacker group is evil and needs to be stopped. The security community is saying that it is about time that large organizations take security seriously.

It's more a story of bad security practices than brilliant exploits by 12 year olds.

That _is_ the entire story. Nobody is saying that XYZ 1337 hacker group is evil and needs to be stopped. The security community is saying that it is about time that large organizations take security seriously.

This is the UN we're talking about. They don't take anything seriously except themselves. And it's reciprocal for the rest of us.

Inactions of dictators and governments, are usually a good thing. Not so for an organization that is supposed to hold dictators and governments back. Then it only makes things worse, because actions cease to have consequences, especially if the governments of the world rely on the UN to resolve the situation, which they often do. Well, except Israel, and the US for the past few years. Israel wouldn't exist anymore if it relied on the UN.

I'd propose that they do hold the dictators and governments back by having their representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk and do nothing else.

I'm not clear from the way you said this whether you are proposing that they do this in the future, or that you are proposing that the idea is they are doing this already.

Either way, having representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk does absolutely nothing to stop a dictator or other government from doing anything. The representatives of dicatators only job is to sit around and talk and talk and talk trying to delay any action against the dictator, which frees the bad guys up to do what they wa

It's not clear whether the passwords are plaintext, un-salted hashes, or salted hashes. plaintext and un-salted would be pretty bad. If the passwords have a long random salt, they would resist rainbow-table attacks, I think?

Log in there and install as many backdoors as you possibly can! Loggers, rootkits, whatever you can!Let us watch those fuckers!Privacy is for private people. Governments must be open. Otherwise they are illegitimate. Never the other way around.

Planting keyloggers, or sniffing the network for trivially encripted passwords (i.e. proxy passwords), or setting a fake server where they should authenticate are a few easy alternatives to obtain passwords in unencrypted form, no matter how they are stored in the authentication servers.

If there is one thing that will result in the UN stepping in to places like Darfur, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, clearly it is having email accounts and login credentials spread around. If only T3amP01s0n had been around in the 1940s they could have... um... published UN mailing addresses and lock combinations to prevent the creation of Israel and the disposition of the Palestinian people (? - did they mean dispossession, or do they mean that the UN creating Israel is responsible for Palestinians' bad dispositions?). Thank god for groups like TEAmpoiSON who are working to make the world a better place through releasing such incriminating information on a truly evil organization - clearly a blow for freedom!

I just don't understand the thinking behind actions like this, especially with respect to the groups stated reasons. The UN failed to step in to prevent genocide(s), so we are going to try to harm, embarrass, or destroy the institution... because then, there wouldn't be an institution failing to act in such circumstances, which is clearly a better alternative! And also, Israel!!

I can't honestly comprehend what the use of hacking the UN is. First, it can do little except what the majority of nations or the Security Council tells it to do, and of that, there is not much. Second, agree with it or not, it is what it is. Hacking it, shaming it, or protesting it doesn't do anything but make it even less effective.

It's not as though they can change, as they have no real power to begin with. And it's not as though there is an alternative. For instance, we might think doing away with l

I used to work for a UN agency and spent a year specifically working on governance reform for IT. The idea that "the" UN has email systems is kind of funny. While some agencies have well-designed, well-run, consolidated communications & IT systems, those are more the exception than the rule. By and large, each agency has multiple divisions or programmes that run their own IT systems with little to no effective oversight. Disparate systems and dependence on abandonware are prevalent. Governance & policies are (*ahem*) lacking in most cases, and enforcement is by and large nonexistent. Tell a Deputy Director that he has to have a password of more than four characters or change it more than once a year? Good luck with that.There is simply no framework or middle ground for getting an agency or multiple agencies to adopt best practices when their reality vacillates wildly between disasters/getting shot at/real work one day, and political fights/internal corruption/not having enough money to run simple services on the next. While seeing this on pastebin is disappointing, it's not the least bit surprising. It falls more in the category of "someone noticed the door was hanging open and put some mild effort into it" rather than "1337 h@xx0r broke into a fortress."The sad part is that the likely outcome of this event is a long series of dreary Euro-proper weekly meetings at UNDP and other agencies, eventually resulting in a task force of a dozen people at the Secretariat charged with defining what "fix" means, followed by a slew of small teams at each affected agency to work on the perceived ICT policy, operation, and configuration problems. But no authority will be given to those teams to mandate changes to their respective ICT Chiefs. In 6-9 months a series of changes to security controls will be recommended, but they'll be overridden, redirected, and mangled by their respective IT orgs; in all probability the money & effort will be unrecognizable and the effects negligible. It's like The Office without the slightest hint of humor.